Firebird
by venusianeye
Summary: she wants to tear off pieces of herself; mostly the pieces that love you.  sapphic, unpleasant, WIP.


**warnings: **damn near anything you can think of.

**disclaimer: **not mine

**notes: **post-movie.

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><p><em>You need to move out,<em> says the mockingbird.

The air is thick with frozen music, clustered around your head like ominous grapes on a vine. If you breathe at all you know, somehow, the frantic notes will slide up your nostrils and into your brain and get you wildly drunk. You don't want that. Not now.

This place is gigantic – a whole indoor vineyard, really – and you know (like you know your bones) that beyond this smothering blanket of undead music there is a massive, sprawling stone labyrinth. There are no colors, here, only shades of gray, thundering out into the horizon, where the walls crumble into an infinitely desolate sea. You know this because you are the brick and mortar of this place, you are the rotting architecture just as much as you are the ghost perched on the world's only chair, too frightened of intoxication to breathe. You know the size of this universe. It's immense.

_I'm serious... Like, maybe a condo?_

But it's _not vast enough_, because somehow, that damn bird found you.

Its eyes are red and beady as it squawks at you. You keep your hands over your mouth and nose and wonder how it got in – you've been wondering that for a very long time, actually, and you would like it very much if the bird would explain, but seeing as how the air is absolutely thick with silent music waiting to drive you into a mad tarantella, you refuse to open your mouth and ask.

It's been a stalemate.

The bird chirps at you and you try to ignore it, try to sink into being the _ocean_, the _maze_, the _mortar_ of the prison-palace, instead of a thing with a brain, so you don't have to think about it.

_Aren't you bored yet?_ The mockingbird cackles. It blinks at you, and you get the awful feeling that you're being pitied. That's a relic from the part of you that thinks and feels – you never could bear being pitied.

The black-and-white bird hops along the ground in your line of sight, pretending to investigate the gravel, settling its feathers, giving you coy glances every now and then, chipping away at your patience. _Where's that spark, sweetie?_

How the _fuck_ did it get in?

_Look up,_ the bird suggests, smugly, and then – leaving you alone, which you've been praying for for weeks – flies upwards.

You're not sure why, but the departure of the bird fills you with dread, and you know, suddenly, with a jolt of pure terror, that there is a leviathan moving in your ocean.

In your panic, as the waves seethe, you accidentally look up.

"...oh," you breathe, your hands falling to your sides.

You forgot to build a roof.

_You forgot not to breathe -_

The music rushes into your skull like the Flood, a horrible cacophony, piling into your mouth so fast and thick you can't even _scream -_

it's that feeling you get when you bob to the surface of the water -

* * *

><p>The first thing Nina Sayers saw when she rose, groggily, from her unconsciousness, was a white ceiling. It was smooth, and blank, which was comforting. Ceilings with stucco paint always made her want to pick off the texture, sand it down into something uniform – a quick route to chipped nails and torn cuticles. She blinked, tried to sit up, and was reduced to a whimpering, high-pitched <em>sob<em> by the pain.

"Hey, princess, you're awake," she heard against a murmur of quiet, regular beeping. "And I didn't even have to kiss you."

… She knew that voice.

If she craned her neck and lifted her head from the pillow she could see Lily, slouching in a chair next to a window covered with venetian blinds. At first she thought Lily was naked beneath her leather jacket – Nina blinked – it was a leotard that almost matched her skin tone. In flagrant disregard of hospital regulations, Lily was smoking. In equally flagrant disregard for Nina's sanity, she was also grinning like a wolf.

"You need to move out," Lily declared, cheerfully, as if she would brook no arguments on the subject. If Nina felt like a sack of punched, bruised fruit, Lily actually looked like one. Her face reminded Nina vaguely of what plums look like when you dig your thumbnails under the skin and peel it off in strips – enflamed, veiny redness over raw, semi-translucent flesh. Her eyes, especially, were puffy and tired, and Nina set her jaw against the looming, obsessive thought of peeling away Lily's eyelids. "Your mother is _batshit_."

Nina's head ached. She shut her eyes and lay perfectly still. Perhaps Lily would take the hint.

The rough-yet-high-pitched voice continued to drawl into Nina's ears, making itself at home. "I mean, _Jesus_, she's been driving the nurses crazy. I dunno how you put up with that – I dunno _why _you put up with that. You're the _prima ballerina_, you can pay rent, can't you?"

Her head was really throbbing. For god's sake, why couldn't she _rest? _"...I was supposed to die," Nina remarked, woodenly, too quietly for Lily to hear her. Maybe, she thought, lifting weak fingers to press against the bandages – they ran up and down her torso like the coils of a paper snake – maybe that was happened when you flung yourself headlong into death and failed. Maybe the smaller deaths rejected you.

" - so why don't you move in with Thomas? Seriously, you _can't _stay with that woman, you'll go crazy."

The irony of that statement did not escape - oh god, she _kissed_ Thomas. In front of the whole company. Oh god.

"Or, you know, me," Lily said, laughing at Nina's grimace and getting cigarette ash on her tan leggings as she gestured. "I have a couch."

As if it were something simple and easy, Lily slowly rearranged her legs, folding one relaxed thigh over another, wiggling her pedicured toes in her sandal, talking and laughing . The muscles roped over Lily's legs were soft, relaxed, like a gun with no bullets or a noose in the breeze. A sick heat throbbed in Nina's chest. She couldn't look away, and her eyelids kept flying open when she tried to squeeze them shut. She blamed the IV – buried in her arm like a worm – there had to be something in the drip.

" - so, yeah, the season's been going okay, but everyone misses you, girl -"

That was a filthy lie. Nina tried not to look at Lily's mouth. She failed.

"- the critics are still jizzing all over your performance, so -" she paused, laughed a little - "so, yeah, you can _imagine_ the kind of flak I've been getting -" she paused again, taking a drag on her cigarette - "not like anyone's been _bullying_ me, they don't have the balls, but it kinda sucks being _just not as good._ You know?" she said, raising an eyebrow at Nina, a weird light in her red eyes. "It's like the opposite of type casting. Against-the-type casting. Like, _ooh_, look at the little alternate, too bad she doesn't-"

"Why are you here?" Nina asked, trying very, very hard not to let her voice crack or grind her teeth. She mostly succeeded. (Were those feathers in Lily's hair? No.)

For a few long, awful moments Lily just stared at Nina, looking almost like she was going to ask something. She shifted her legs again – Nina felt an unpleasant cold sweat beading on her lower back beneath the gauze – and then the chair creaked, destroying the tentative ambiance.

The way Lily laughed was unreasonably beautiful, considering she sounded like a horse with a cough. "Geez. You might find this hard to believe – I mean you're gonna think I'm lying through my teeth - but I'm kinda sick of being the _prima_."

"That _is_ unbelievable," Nina agreed, ice settling into her veins, allowing her a small modicum of dignity (for example, she was able to stop staring at Lily's legs). "There isn't a girl alive who doesn't want -"

"Yeaaah, not so much," Lily breathed, biting her lower lip a little and grinning (not laughing _at_ Nina, never directly). Some nameless, powerful element began to change the aura around Lily's body – like a corona of light, or a heat ripple in the air, something that smelled like spice, sweat, power. The spirit of some dreadful, mesmerizing flame... the sunlight from the blinds fell in stripes on Lily's hair, turning the stray wisps into strands of floating amber light. Nina wondered when her mother would be back and wondered, a little bit desperately, just what kind of drugs they'd put her on.

Gazing at some indefinite point on the floor, Lily shrugged, and began grinding her cigarette out the windowsill. "It's not _my_ ballet," she murmured. A frown creased her face.

Of course it wasn't Lily's ballet – it was Thomas' ballet, it was the company's ballet – but there was something strange in the way Lily had said it. Nina floundered for objections, for some measure of reserve against the halo rising from Lily's (_beautiful)_ skin, and came up empty-handed. She was powerless to move, to run, as Lily rose – floated? - up from her chair and wafted gently to the bedside, leaning over her supine body.

Throbbing throbbing her chest was shaking so hard it _hurt -_

Lily reached into her leather jacket and pulled out a thin index card, digits scrawled across it in what looked like mascara. Nina's hands clenched into fists at her sides; as delicately as a surgeon and with the intimacy of a killer, Lily slipped her number between the bandages on Nina's right side. "Call me, okay?" she murmured, her hot breath brushing against the the goosebumps on Nina's neck. (It felt like being branded.) "If you need somewhere to crash."

" - out. Get _out_," Nina choked.

"Okay, okay," Lily laughed, raising her hands and backing off – it got a little easier to breathe. "Jeez. You're cranky when you're sick."

"Get out," Nina repeated, sweat beading at her temples, staring at Lily as hard as she could – as if she just had to stare hard enough and Lily would disappear.

"See you at the studio," Lily said, stepping lightly out through the door – her left hand, waving a desultory farewell, was the last thing Nina saw of her, and then -

Then the pure, tidy feeling of being a non-entity settled into Nina's consciousness. It was almost like an out of body experience, except Nina's soul never left - it hovered just under her skin.

Her mother came in, crying and accusing and clutching her arm hard enough to bruise, and it was all right, because Nina was the starched linen bedsheets, the corset of bandages, the steady metronome drip of the IV, and there was nothing to get upset over. She remembered perfection too well to be disturbed from it – let herself steep in the zen center of it, murmured demure and sweet apologies as her mother sobbed herself hoarse and sick, flexed each muscle one by one and silently cataloged the stiffness. Her mood was vague, abstract.

_(But there was something moving, under the water -)_

No. Everything was fine, except –

It was only – it was just that her stitches – and the card with Lily's number – itched.

* * *

><p>tbc.<p>

UM SO YEAH. plot twists visible from a million miles away, much? & I'm a little unsure if I want to continue this so even though this is a measly, short little scrap of a chapter, I'd looooove to hear from y'all.


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